Why Americans Refrigerate Eggs

A few years ago, I bought some fresh eggs from a friend who owned chickens. They were wonderful. I’m not fussy about the topic so I can’t say that I go out of my way to get fresh eggs. I’ll take them when I can get them. However, I’ve long been intrigued by her instructions to me: “they do not need to be refrigerated.”

Government tends toward mandating or forbidding in every area of life. This struck me as weird. I guess I thought they would spoil if they are left out or maybe gradually become a chicken or something. She assured me no, and her explanation was compelling. If eggs have never been refrigerated, they don’t have to be. Commercial eggs are, so that’s why we put them in the fridge.

Sounds right. But it turns out that the story is actually more complex. No surprise: the real answer has to do with government regulations over whether eggs should be washed. In the United States, the government mandates washing eggs before commercial sale. In Europe, egg washing is forbidden by law.

Doesn’t that just sum up the problem of government? It tends toward either mandating or forbidding in every area of life, even on matters such as whether eggs should or should not be washed.

The FDA explains that they are only saving you and me from horrible diseases.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a regulation expected to prevent each year approximately 79,000 cases of foodborne illness and 30 deaths caused by consumption of eggs contaminated with the bacterium Salmonella Enteritidis.

The regulation requires preventive measures during the production of eggs in poultry houses and requires subsequent refrigeration during storage and transportation.

Egg-associated illness caused by Salmonella is a serious public health problem. Infected individuals may suffer mild to severe gastrointestinal illness, short term or chronic arthritis, or even death. Implementing the preventive measures would reduce the number of Salmonella Enteritidis infections from eggs by nearly 60 percent.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the regulators explain that the forbidding of egg washing is only saving people from horrible diseases:

In general, eggs should not be washed or cleaned because such practices can cause damage to the egg shell, which is an effective barrier to bacterial ingress with an array of antimicrobial properties. However, some practices, such as the treatment of eggs with ultra-violet rays, should not be interpreted as constituting a cleaning process. Moreover, Class A eggs should not be washed because of the potential damage to the physical barriers, such as the cuticle, which can occur during or after washing. Such damage may favour trans-shell contamination with bacteria and moisture loss and thereby increase the risk to consumers, particularly if subsequent drying and storage conditions are not optimal.

Who is right? According to a New York Times report, there is a case either way:

But — and here is the big piece of the puzzle — washing the eggs also cleans off a thin, protective cuticle devised by nature to protect bacteria from getting inside the egg in the first place. (The cuticle also helps keep moisture in the egg.) With the cuticle gone, it is essential — and, in the United States, the law — that eggs stay chilled from the moment they are washed until you are ready to cook them.Salmonella outbreaks are more prevalent in large operations where the chickens are kept in close quarters, often in cages stacked on top of one another. Some large-scale producers vaccinate their flocks, but not all. Thus, the one-size-fits-all washing regulation.

There we have it: there are tradeoffs either way, as with most things in life. The trouble with government is that it always thinks it possesses knowledge of the one and only way, and it is so convinced of this that it is willing to impose its knowledge at the point of a gun. The absurdity becomes apparent when two governments completely disagree. The result is vastly different ways of going about things.

Proposition: what if governments declined to make any rules concerning egg washing? What if we left this to the market to work things out? Crazy, right? Not so much. No egg producer wants to poison anyone. You have consumers who want the best, safest, cheapest eggs, and producers who want to provide them at a profit. Put the two together and you have a functioning system, with no need for government to be involved at all.

I further submit that government has proven more generally dangerous to public life than any disease that an egg might give us. Salmonella is curable; government, not so much.

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Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is also a managing partner of Vellum Capital, CEO of the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy, Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna, Austria, Honorary Fellow of Mises Brazil, adviser to Acton Institute and Mackinac Institute, founder and Chief Liberty Officer of Liberty.me, an adviser to blockchain application companies, past editorial director of the Foundation for Economic Education and Laissez Faire Books, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, and author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

The Economics of Life Itself : Beautiful Anarchy is the writing platform of Jeffrey Tucker, in which he covers economics, art, popular culture, and politics from a pro-liberty, anti-state point of view.

Its funny in the version of Gulliver’s travels I read as a kid one of the reasons he left the island was a dispute between 2 kingdoms on the island on what end to crack an egg. How I remember this I have no idea.

Mandate? Mandates are enFORCED by-surprise, surprise–force. Force is violence and violence begets violence. The use of violence in human affairs is more dangerous than food poisoning from free-market producers.

Not to knock irradiation. During the 1970s, I owned and operated a cider mill. As far as I could tell, I was the first cider maker to use UV to give my fresh cider a longer shelf life without the loss of flavor associated with pasteurizing and preservatives. I’m damn glad I wasn’t mandated to treat my cider with or by any means or I probably wouldn’t have lasted long in the business. I hate having government bureaucritters tell me I have to do this or that. When Jimmy Carter’s energy czar informed me by mail that I had to turn the heat down in my unheated cider mill, I responded appropriately–for a libertarian confronted by idiocy.

No one if forcing the large egg producers to get larger, or am I missing something? What is driving the cramped quarters in egg producing facilities, apart from greed? (Assumes that cramped quarters is what drives up the incidence of bacterial contamination) How would removing the restrictions and allowing for unwashed, room-temperature eggs fix this? I get this argument with my local farmer. But the local farmer seems to be going the way of the dodo… (THAT, I understand, is being helped by government support of the large producers). Right now, sounds like the European way is smarter and then washing an egg right before using would be prudent.

Read (Polyface Farm) Joel Salatin’s “Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal” and you will discover how insidious our food regulators are. It will be interesting to see which regulations (and subsidies!) Perdue will take on at DoAg–if he is every confirmed.

If milk producers (farmers) actually cared about their customers and were able to sell directly to them, the customers would rightly demand that the cows be kept clean, eat only grass from a pasture (where the cows would spend most of their time), and that the equipment in the on-site dairy be clean.

Instead, we have large milk marketers buying the milk from the farmers without serious regard to the condition of the animals, trucking it to dairy operations many miles away, blending it with milk from other farms, and not worrying about cleanliness of the inputs. Then, they can just rely on pasteurization to do its magic, and you have something that’s drinkable, no matter the conditions it was exposed to before pasteurization.

So this way, they can allow these practices to occur, then mandate what has to be done to prevent you from killing yourself by ingesting their mass-produced white watery solution.

At least the state of which I am an occupant has not outlawed direct sales of milk. Yet. Nor have they outlawed direct sales of chicken eggs. Yet. So I can still walk across the street and purchase these from my neighborhood farmer.

Strange how the government allows the food mafia to take raw materials that in nature MIGHT be harmful to you (but really aren’t), and then process the sh*t out of the stuff, and then allows you to drive ten miles to a grocery chain store and buy that adulterated junk after it’s been processed beyond recognition. And it’s all for your own good.

Govt., i.e., a ruling elite, is self serving, at out expense, even to the death sometimes, but alway explained as “for the common good”.
Complaining, appealing to reason, or begging for mercy from exploitation is futile. Rulers rule for themselves, not us.
The only solution is to boycott govt., the concept of institutionalized violence.
A govt. by voluntary consent would be civil, reasonable, nothing less is.

I agree. But should the rules for New York City be the same as for everywhere else? I am perfectly satisfied to let the people of New York City live with the rules they want when I can just walk across the street to get my farm-fresh eggs without their rules attached.

We will be free from govt. when we are free from superstition.
When studying economics in 1959 my mentor said: “The purpose of school should be to teach us how to think. When we graduate, we can decide what to think.” He was 74. I was 17. I thought that was profound. Now, I am 74. I can more fully appreciate how profound that statement was.
If we were armed with the ability to think, it would protect us from falling for superstitions.